Our Father knows all science, this is how miracles happened. Science is not separate from Our Father, it is that at the time of the Bible not much Science was discovered yet. It’s not magic.
Shame, I think a little magic here and there could be a good thing.
Richard
None of your evidences actually hold water (sorry couldn’t resist). For example this one.
Dr. Snelling was photographed standing next to a crack in folded rock which isn’t supposed to exist. Now why is that you think? And Dr. Snelling’s own research in the Grand Canyon failed to support his supposed explanation for the cracks.
And this one would actually disprove a global flood.
The verse is Genesis 3:15. It is not the same word, but the meaning is the same: enemy or adversary. It is not a name but a role and the role is the same.
It is true that some translations in the past used the same word and made this identification look stronger than it really is in the literal text. But I think it is strong enough.
Did you mean 3:14?
And in the OT, satan is a title and not a name. In Job the satan was walking around in the Divine Council. So I am a little confused about what you are trying to say here.
Which truth is that?
Richard
When I read something like this a bit of a song always comes to my mind.
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Oh I don’t know, some seem to have worked out how to milk the broadcasting system for financial gain and security quite effectively.
Richard
Welcome. I apologize for being late to the party. I’ll try to work my way through the 70+ comments later.
The genealogies serve the same purpose they originally served when they were written/edited. TL/DR: They are a polemic against the Sumerian King List.
https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared/docs/ois4.pdf#page=47
I’ll try to summarize the history of the Sumerian King List to save you the trouble of reading the whole article.
The first Mesopotamian king to be accorded divine status was Naram-sin. As the author memorably says,
The land was reunited in the third dynasty of Ur (Ur III, 2012-2004 BC) by Ur-Namma. In his 18-yr reign, he started (and possibly completed) ziggurats in the main cities of Ur, Uruk, Eridu and Nippur, but he died leading his troops in battle. This was a cosmic disaster.
His young son, Shulgi, took the throne under dangerous circumstances and ruled for nearly 50 years (2094-47). First, he had to fend off several attempts at foreign invasion, but then he had to undo the damage to the reputation he inherited from his father. The first 20 years of Shulgi’s reign were dedicated to that task. By the 21st year of his reign, all inscriptions attach the cuneiform sign for “god” before Shulgi’s name. How did that happen?
The next part is particularly relevant. Shulgi’s scribes “wiped the slate clean” and retrained the next generation of scribes in royal propaganda.
Finally, whew!, here’s the payoff:
So Shulgi had the Sumerian King List composed to legitimize his claim to divinity via descent from Gilgamesh. After his dynasty fell, the next picked up the SKL and added their own names to legitimize their rule as “descended from heaven.” It was political propaganda from start to finish. The scribes of a later dynasty added the names of rulers who came “before the flood,” and the lengths of their rules are between 43,200 and 28,800 years each for a total of 241,200 years.
The latter is what the genealogies in early Genesis write against. (I’m tempted to say “mock,” but that’s not exactly right, even though Isaiah mocks pagan beliefs in his writing.) The lifetimes of people before the flood in Genesis are long enough to give us pause, but they’re roughly 1000x shorter than the kings who lived before the flood in the SKL.
Now here’s the kicker. Babylonian kings who adopted the SKL to legitimize their claim to the throne continued to use the cuneiform for “god” before their names, but none after Shulgi had temples and cults dedicated to their worship. Instead, they became the gods’ representative on Earth, and kings were credited with every cultural advance. Genesis says, “Nope.”
The king isn’t the image of God – all of humanity is. And in the genealogies, the king isn’t responsible for building cities, inventing tents and livestock, musical instruments, or metallurgy. Ordinary people do all those things.
That’s the lesson we learn from knowing a bit of history.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, here’s a Christmas connection.
In the time of Christ, Augustus promoted the cult of emperor worship outside of Italy as a political tool to unite his far-flung lands. While Julius Caesar had not been deified until after his death, a precedent that Augustus and Tiberius officially followed, the worship of still-living rulers was an ancient and accepted practice in Asia and Egypt. Before the Senate conferred “Augustus” upon him, Octavian styled himself Divi Iuli Filius (“Son of the Divine Julius”), which he later shortened to Divi Filius (“Son of the God”), a title that the emperors Tiberius, Nero, and Domitian also adopted and promoted on their coinage. Pergamum, the Roman capital of the province of Asia, built a temple to worship Augustus in 29 B.C. and another for Trajan at the end of the first century. The city was so well-known for emperor worship that the Revelation of John (also written near the end of the first century) could refer to it simply as “Satan’s throne.”
In nearby Smyrna, the famous Priene Calendar Inscription calls Augustus a “Savior” and a “God” whose birth marked “the beginning of the good news (Gk. evangelion) for the world.”
It is against this backdrop that the opening words of Mark’s gospel, traditionally written in Rome, must be considered: “The beginning of the good news (Gk. evangelion) of Jesus the Anointed, the Son of God.” Not only was Jesus executed on the charge that he claimed to be King of the Jews, but his message, “the good news,” was presented by the gospel writers as the true alternative to the cult of emperor worship. When the early church ascribed the same titles to Jesus that the Roman emperors had taken for themselves, conflict was assured; accusations of sedition and centuries of persecution were the inevitable results for the earliest Christians.